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Monday, July 25, 2016

Educational Resources & Tech Tools 07/26/2016

Significant research has shown that early school start times negatively impact teenagers’ performance and health.

Early start times create problems for students for a simple reason: Teenagers need sleep.

Teenagers have evolving sleep patterns that can keep them up into the wee hours, forcing them to tap the snooze button repeatedly the next morning. Not getting the recommended 8.5-9.5 hours a night means, as a researcher from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put it, many students enter the classroom as “essentially brain dead” and “walking zombies.”

a lack of sleep has been linked to an increased risk of obesity, depression and unhealthy behavior (drug, alcohol and tobacco use) among teens. The CDC also notes that adolescents who don’t get enough sleep tend to perform worse academically than their well-rested peers.

Factors like transportation needs, parents’ work schedules, students’ work schedules, collective bargaining agreements and afterschool programs all need to be addressed. And all of these factors are politically thorny on some level.

Scholastic athletics, with its regular travel and daylight requirements, are especially tricky, both logistically and politically.

The telecomm company used design thinking to come up with a different approach: Rather than inject “training” into employees, it studied the job of a retail sales agent over the first nine months and developed a “journey map” showing what people need to know the first day, the first week, the first month, and then over the first few quarters.

What this process revealed is that there are some urgent learning needs that must be addressed immediately, and then there are people to meet, systems to learn, products to understand, and many other processes to master over the first year. And of course, much of this involves getting to know customers, product experts, and fundamentals of sales and customer service.